CONCORD, N.C. — Crew chief Steve Letarte thinks there’s a pretty simple strategy for taking Dale Earnhardt Jr. from a driver whose consistency keeps him near the top of the standings to one who leads laps and wins races consistently.

“The faster you go, the easier the race is to call, the less pressure there is on the driver on the restarts, the less pressure there is on the pit crew,” Letarte said Wednesday at Charlotte Motor Speedway. “As much as it takes today to run well in NASCAR in the Sprint Cup Series, it comes down to lap times.

“If you’re a faster car, so much opens up that it takes a lot of pressure off everybody and you find yourself making less mistakes trying to overcome a slower car.”

Letarte and Earnhardt worked on having a fast car for 2013 as they tested with NASCAR’s new Sprint Cup car Tuesday and Wednesday. They have reached the Chase for the Sprint Cup in their two years together at Hendrick Motorsports.

But they won only one race last season and Earnhardt ranked 11th in laps led with just 358 (3.43 percent of all laps run). While in the top four in points for much of the regular season, Earnhardt was never higher than seventh in the Chase and fell to 11th after a crash at Talladega led to a concussion that caused him to miss the next two races. He wound up 12th in the standings.

“Last year, there were two races we were the dominant car,” Letarte said. “We won one of them (at Michigan). The first Pocono, I think, we had the dominant car. We didn’t win.

“Of those 34 that are left, there are probably four or five we put ourselves in position on pit strategy. To become a dominant team, you need to have enough speed that you have the dominant car in four or five races and then you put yourself in position for another six or seven. That comes down to speed.”

Earnhardt says he needs to have more speed consistently.

“Well, you would like to believe in momentum and things like that, (but) in this sport you can be a hero one week and a zero the next,” he said. “There is so much competition out there.”

Letarte doesn’t expect his team to have the new 2013 cars totally figured out by early next season, but neither will the competition. The key, he said, will be keeping up with developing technology on the new car. In 2012, Hendrick teams appeared to have a jump on some rear end suspension technology that contributed to them running better than the competition in the middle of the season. They didn’t win during the first 10 races, but then won five in a row and nine of 13, including Earnhardt’s win at Michigan.

“It’s going to be how we adapt to the rules, how quickly we can discover new speed,” Letarte said. “Last year, we found some good speed and as the field caught up, we couldn’t distance ourselves from the group as fast as we needed to in the second half of the year.”

Earnhardt says getting a handle on the new car quickly will be his team’s biggest challenge.

“There are a lot of variables with the new car, completely new; the sport is going to be revolutionized again with this car,” he said. “There are a lot of things that are unknowns, but I’m with a great company that sort of does really well under those kinds of circumstances.

“When there are a lot of unknown variables they are really good at figuring those variables out and figuring out how to be competitive. Given a certain working space, they can kind of figure it out faster than most people. I’m fortunate in that regard.”

Earnhardt, who said he liked the new car after two days of testing, is confident going into next season.

“I can go into next year confident that we are going to put good cars on the track and I’m going to like the way they drive and I’m going to enjoy the races that we have,” he said.